I had to pick one. I couldn’t eat two. The bakery is amazing. It’s a remarkable pastry shop for a city of this size.

It was a tough call picking between the chocolate croissant and the baklava croissant. The chocolate is the classic: light, buttery chocolate that melts in your mouth. The baklava is something I’d never tried before. Both croissants smiled at me in the way a croissant does.

Picking one would mean missing out on the other. Doing the wrong thing would mean that I’d missed my chance to do the right thing. The line forming behind me added pressure to the situation.

Deciding on a direction for your law firm is much like picking a croissant. The same forces are at work. We can stick with the classics, or we can try something new. We can stand still, torn between competing visions, while the pressure builds and then find ourselves paralyzed by our choices.

When we struggle with the croissant options, the stakes are relatively low. We feel some fear of missing out when forced to make our choice because picking one means we lose out on the other. But it’s just a croissant, and there’s always another day for another croissant. We know we’ve got to decide, so we make the decision, eat the croissant, and move on.

Making big decisions about our law firms is different. There’s not the same pressure in the moment. When we’re charting our course, creating our vision, and narrowing our focus, it feels as if we have time to think, evaluate, ponder, and then decide. We don’t feel the eyes of the people in line behind us urging us to make a decision.

When the decision is about our business, the consequences feel much larger than those involved in picking a croissant. Making a decision is much harder. We’re excited about more than one thing. We have passion for multiple strategic directions. We see opportunities with each possibility. We fear that picking one option will result in our losing out on other options.

We make a quick decision on the croissant. We take our time with the law firm decisions. Unfortunately, many of us take months that turn into years. The years turn into decades, and the decades turn into entire careers. It’s not extraordinary for us to retire before we figure out our focus. We get stuck between the chocolate and the baklava.

When that happens, we end up with neither the chocolate nor the baklava. We end up with something that we might not have wanted, that we never deliberately pursued, and that was decided upon in the moment and quite likely selected by others. We end up with someone else’s pastry. It’s sweet and delicious usually, but we run the risk of getting something we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen.

We can have whatever we want when it comes to building our practices. We can create whatever we can visualize. We can end up in the place we set out to go. But getting there involves making a choice. It involves giving up something in exchange for getting something else. It involves taking action so that we control our destiny rather than surrendering control to other forces.

Being forced to choose between multiple good options is a pretty good problem to have. Whatever we choose is going to put us in a good place, doing good things for good people in exchange for good money. Failing to make a choice, while it’s the easiest course of action in the moment, means that we lose out on most of the good that comes from making a decision.

I went with the baklava croissant. It was pretty awesome. It’s still possible that I’ll make it back for the chocolate before I leave town. But it’s possible that, when faced with the choice again, I’ll go with baklava again. Nothing is ever easy.